Weekend Reading: Stories of Displacement

“Mississippi was at once my ancestral land, and the sinister setting in any number of Hollywood movies, a villain in our national narrative, the place where a black boy named Emmett Till was tossed into the Tallahatchie River with a cotton gin fan around his neck.” There we are, toes curled at the edge, with Nikole Hannah-Jones, of ProPublica, as she dives into her uprooted family’s history. In 1947, Hannah-Jones tells us, her family was pushed north; nearly seventy years later, she was pulled back down South. What she found might not surprise some, but it still haunts:

It was eerie being down here where it happened, just a few miles from where my dad grew up, and realizing how easily he could have been Till. We somehow convince ourselves that this is ancient history. But I am not even 40, and my dad was but four years younger than Emmett Till. Like my dad, Till’s mother had also left as one of hundreds of thousands of black Mississippians who fled their homeland during the Great Migration.

Citizenship and dignity remain out of reach for many people. On Tuesday, the writer, activist, and undocumented immigrant Jose Antonio Vargas was detained in Texas by border-patrol officials. (Vargas has contributed to The New Yorker.) Vargas was soon released, but his ordeal, and the ongoing crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border, gives an occasion to turn back to Vargas’s 2011 story for the Times Magazine, in which he chronicles the fear he faces. “On the surface, I’ve created a good life. I’ve lived the American dream,” he writes. “But I am still an undocumented immigrant. And that means living a different kind of reality.”

Eva Holland, in the Montreal-based quarterly Maisonneuve, tells a lesser-known story of displacement: during the Second World War, the American government moved the native inhabitants of the Aleutian Islands, off the coast of Alaska, which were being occupied by the Japanese Army, to the mainland. “The evacuation was prompted partly by a sense of paternal benevolence and responsibility but was conditioned by racist attitudes,” Holland writes. “It would result in three years of suffering and the death of more than a tenth of the Aleuts in the camps.” One Aleut man, who was a teen-ager during the war, remembers what it was like then: “We were treated like animals.”